The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War

THE HAWK AND THE DOVE

THE

HAWK

AND THE

DOVE

PAUL NITZE, GEORGE KENNAN,

AND THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR

NICHOLAS THOMPSON

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY   NEW YORK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thompson, Nicholas, 1975–

The hawk and the dove : Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the history of the Cold War Nicholas Thompson.—1st ed.

   p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-8050-8142-8

1. Nitze, Paul H. 2. Kennan, George F. (George Frost), 1904–2005. 3. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 4. Cold War. 5. National security—United States—History—20th century. 6. Anti-communist movements—United States—History—20th century. 7. Ambassadors—United States—Biography. 8. United States—Officials and employees—Biography. I. Title.

E744.T494 2009

973.92—dc22

2009009225

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To Danielle and Ellis

CONTENTS

Prologue

1.   Now Is the Time to Live

2.   Charming, Witty, and Urbane

3.   A Strange Intensity, a Strange Beauty

4.   Deceit, Corruption, Penetration, Subversion

5.   Avoid Trivia

6.   Architect of the Cold War

7.   What We Are About

8.   Confined to Korea

9.   The Full Meridian of My Glory

10.  A Fully Conventional Life

11.  Deadly Serious Either Way

12.  About 60/40

13.  The Other Side of the Barricades

14.  This Delegation Is a Disaster

15.  You Constantly Betray Yourself

16.  I Am Worried About Everything

17.  We Tried, We Tried

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Index

THE HAWK AND THE DOVE

PROLOGUE

On February 17, 1984, Paul Nitze decided that the arms race could wait. For the past two and a half years, he had led the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. But on this day, he left that grave work in the early afternoon to dress in black tie and hop on a train to Princeton, New Jersey.

He was heading north to attend the eightieth-birthday party of a man who was both a close friend and a bitter rival: George Kennan. Nitze had been Kennan’s deputy on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s, and the two had worked together on some of the most important issues the country ever faced. They tried to reverse the partition of Germany; they helped write the Marshall Plan; they advised Harry Truman on whether to build a hydrogen bomb. And then, for thirty-five years, they had disagreed profoundly on the direction the country should take. Even at this moment, each believed that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.

Nitze arrived just in time to join the sixty other friends, colleagues, children, and grandchildren at the celebration. After dinner ended, he stood up slowly and raised his glass to give a toast. Among those born after 1904, I know of no one who has been more fortunate in his bosses than have I, he said. He then listed a series of remarkable mentors and what he had learned from each of them.

Soon he turned to the real center of attention: the taller, thinner, balder man celebrating his birthday. Kennan had just published a long article in the New Yorker and was hard at work on his seventeenth book, this one about the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. An immensely complicated individual, he was revered both as one of the men who had started the Cold War and as the one most determined to end it.

Nitze continued gracefully. "George Kennan taught us to approach the issues of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the cultures and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the opinions of mankind.

George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil. But the warmth of his and Annelise’s friendship for Phyllis and for me has never faltered, said Nitze, referring to his and Kennan’s wives.

I extend my appreciation, gratitude and thanks to George, who has been a teacher and an example for close to forty years.

The guests clinked their glasses and cheered. It was one of the tensest periods of the arms race: just three months ago, Nitze’s arms talks had collapsed in a way that many people thought would invite war; one week ago, the KGB veteran who had been running the Soviet Union had died. But this was a moment for two old friends, not for the quiet but ever-present terror that colored these years.

Kennan rose to respond: the main lesson he had learned from Nitze, he said, was that, when one disagreed with government, it may be best to soldier on, and to do what one can to make the things you believe in come out right.

That evening, another guest asked Nitze how he and Kennan had remained friends despite their vast differences on issues of national security. Nitze smiled and responded that he had never had any difference with George except over matters of substance.

PAUL NITZE and George Kennan were the only two people to be deeply involved in American foreign policy from the outset of the Cold War until its end. They had come to prominence in the tumultuous days that followed the Second World War when Germany was divided and the Soviet Union turned from ally into enemy. They immersed themselves in the great questions and events to come: the Marshall Plan, Korea, the ever more dangerous arms race, Vietnam, détente, SALT, glasnost. They stepped off stage only when Germany reunited and the Soviet Union dissolved.

The two men were equally influential and equally important, yet vastly different. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America’s policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America’s ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments; but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. In the New Yorker article published just before his eightieth-birthday party, Kennan had indirectly criticized Nitze—who marked the piece up vigorously and also sent a letter to a mutual friend complaining that the argument showed a complete separation from fact and logic.

Nitze was the hawk. When the United States and the Soviet Union built up their terrifying weapon stockpiles soon after World War II, he argued that the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one. If you want peace, prepare for war. More than any other American, Nitze gave shape to the arms race. Kennan came up with the word containment that was used more than any other to describe America’s Cold War policy. But he saw it as a political strategy for combating a political threat. Nitze defined the word the way it was really used: as a military strategy for combating a military threat.

Nitze’s strengths were his organizational skills, his commitment to logic, and his endurance. Few people knew more about weaponry and few people were able to gain as many allies in different parts of Washington. He worked for, or consulted with, every president from FDR to George H. W. Bush. He even impressed his adversaries with his ability to absorb facts and make arguments about nuclear arms. Nitze was a god, said Aleksandr Savelyev, one of his Soviet negotiating counterparts. Just not our god.

Nitze never, however, learned how to manage his superiors: he ended up personally alienating six of those ten presidents. Fired, demoted, or forced to resign so many times that he lost count, Nitze never became either secretary of state or secretary of defense, although he often seemed to deserve both posts. Still, no failure or rejection ever made him sulk for long or disappear. Presidents came and went. But every year there was Paul Nitze, said George Shultz, the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.

Kennan was the dove. For forty years, he argued that America must end its dependence on nuclear weapons. If you want peace, act peacefully. During almost every military conflict from the Korean War through the Iraq War that began in 2003, he argued for forbearance.

Kennan was a brilliant writer: his histories earned the publishing world’s highest prizes, and his memoirs offer one of the finest sketches of America in the first half of the twentieth century. He objected to the arms race—and NATO, the UN, the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration, the Vietnam War, the student movement of the 1960s, the Carter administration, the Reagan administration, and American policy at the very end of the Cold War—with an eloquence that even his steadfast enemies respected.

He also had an uncanny ability to predict many of the great events of his lifetime. When the Cold War was just beginning, he foresaw how it would end. He immediately understood that splitting Germany and creating NATO would harden the division of Europe. In 1949, he astutely predicted how the nuclear arms race would unfold. He foresaw the Sino-Soviet split and grasped, very early, the flaws in America’s strategy in Vietnam.

These keen powers of perception, however, were married with profound vulnerability. Minor slights sent Kennan into deep despair. His last government job ended in failure when he resigned after a trivial setback. If Nitze treated wounds as scratches, Kennan felt scratches as wounds.

Neither of these idiosyncratic and original men conformed exactly to the hawk and dove labels, of course. Yes, Nitze drove the arms race. And he always believed that the Cold War was a series of moments of urgent peril in which the United States must display strength. But if he spent 90 percent of his career raising tensions, he spent the other 10 percent—the moments when actual conflict loomed and he was helping to shape the consequential decisions—lowering them. He tried to halt the Korean War and then helped stop it from spreading. He tried, early on, to extricate the United States from Vietnam. No one worked harder during the Reagan years to broker major arms deals with the Soviets.

Kennan, for his part, was a dove with hidden talons. He helped set up the CIA and later advised it. He worked closely with the FBI. His views on social issues and the value of democracy were those of a pterodactyl. Early on, he advocated standing up firmly to the Soviets. Though terrified of nuclear weapons, he took pride in not being a pacifist and he recommended declaring war against Iran after rioters seized the American embassy in 1979.

DESPITE THESE MANY differences, Kennan and Nitze were warm friends throughout the Cold War. And that lasting friendship has inspired this book.

Nitze was my grandfather, and I remember well his receipt of a letter in 1999 from his old colleague. Nitze was ninety-two years old then, Kennan ninety-five. I was a twenty-four-year-old journalist and had just moved to Washington, D.C. My grandfather was old and frail but, that November, we spent a lovely evening playing bridge and having dinner with friends of his. He, as always, dressed in a jacket and tie and enjoyed a glass or two of red wine. At some point during the evening, he said he wanted to read a letter.

On October 28, he had published an op-ed in the New York Times titled A Threat Mostly to Ourselves, in which he declared that the United States had no more need for the arsenal he had spent his life building and studying. I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons, Nitze wrote. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.

The letter in response was equally simple and heartfelt. "Dear Paul: Warmest congratulations on your recent New York Times article, with every word of which I agree, wrote Kennan. In the light of our longstanding friendship and mutual respect, it is a source of deep satisfaction to me to find the two of us, at our advanced ages, in complete accord on questions that have meant so much to each of us, even when we did not fully agree, in times gone by."

Nitze smiled and laughed as he read it. Later, as we said good-bye, I remarked on the elegance of Kennan’s prose. Yes, George could always write brilliantly, reflected my grandfather, seeming to pause on the word write as if to suggest what it left out. He really could.

His memory, already failing, would decline rapidly in the years ahead. I never talked in depth with him about Kennan, but I remembered that letter five years later, when both men died. Their passings came just six months apart, which seemed fitting. Soon thereafter, I began to investigate their lives and to attempt to discover how their contradictory influences shaped a struggle for the world. My research revealed two very different men who nonetheless shared a commitment to the United States and to their very different ways of serving it. As Alexander Bessmertnykh, a Soviet foreign minister who worked across from each of them at different points during the Cold War, said to me, They both were great in their own gardens.

What follows is a story about friends, but not about friendship. The pair attended each other’s birthday parties and family weddings. They often inspired or enraged each other with their ideas. But the letter in 1999 was a rare one. There are no piles of correspondence or transcripts of personal conversations. They were good friends but not best friends; perhaps if they had been closer, they would have fallen out.

They did, however, greatly respect each other and admire each other’s seriousness of purpose, demeanor, and dedication. They realized they shared an uncommon endurance. They also shared a similar fate: neither reached his ultimate ambitions, while many lesser men reached the positions of influence to which they both aspired.

Most important, they represented two great strains of American thought during the second half of the twentieth century. And perhaps they realized something I came to believe as I worked on this book: one can understand much of the story of the United States during the Cold War by examining the often parallel, and sometimes perpendicular, lives of Paul Nitze and George Kennan.

1

NOW IS THE TIME TO LIVE

Surrounded by chaos, George Kennan remained calm. He stood on the balcony of the American embassy in Moscow, gazing down on the wild celebration below. Women in headscarves danced, screamed, and hugged one another. Men in big lumpy jackets raised their arms and passed each other through the air. Kennan’s nine-year-old daughter, Joan, pranced about on the balcony, tossing candy down to the celebrants. Starved of sugar for the last few years, people lunged up to catch the Life Savers and Necco Wafers.

It was May 9, 1945, just after American and Soviet troops met in Berlin, together snuffing out the last noxious flames of Nazism. Four years before, invading German forces had pressed up against the very outskirts of Moscow. But the Red Army had held the city, and then gradually begun to push the Wehrmacht back. For the last two years, the Soviets had steadily marched west, with the government marking each victory by firing salutes over Moscow. The bigger the victory, the bigger the salvo. In recent months, Muscovites had followed their soldiers’ progress by counting the shots exploding gloriously into the night sky.

As word of the capitulation spread, Soviet citizens had swarmed toward the American embassy, a five-story building just across Red Square from the Kremlin. By early morning on a cloudless day, thousands of people were standing out front, cheering. America had helped defeat the Germans and it had supplied wartime Russia with everything from Spam to Studebakers. Now is the time to live, declared a Russian officer deep in the crowd. Boy, oh boy, mused a young American corporal, if I’d played post office every day until I got into the army, I wouldn’t have been kissed as many times as I’ve been kissed today.

Amid the frenzy, Kennan remained more pensive than passionate. The door now opening led to a very uncertain future. Old Europe had dominated the world for centuries. Now, two countries from beyond Europe’s borders—a former British colony separated by an ocean and a neighbor long considered backward—had joined hands at the center of the continent. From this moment on, everything began anew.

Kennan, a student of history, understood that the future depended on who won the peace, not only on who had won the war. The communists in Russia had been a small, isolated group of pamphleteers before grabbing power in the mayhem of 1917. The aftermaths of wars are the decisive moments of foreign policy, he had written his sister two years earlier.

It is here, in the fields of broken ice, that the lines are drawn which endure—depending on the wisdom with which they are selected—anywhere from a generation to a century. And it is naturally the victors to whom these opportunities present themselves. This is the second great chance we have had. We muffed the first. If we muff this, too, can we be sure that we will be given a third?

With the ambassador away, Kennan, the deputy chief of mission, was the most senior diplomat present. Terrified that the masses might carry him off on their shoulders or toss him in the air, he eventually began waving from the balcony. Then, as the crowd continued to surge and grow, he decided he really had to do something more. He walked downstairs and stepped gingerly out onto the pedestal of one of the great columns in front of the building.

FORTY-ONE YEARS OLD in the spring of 1945, George Frost Kennan stood about six feet tall. He dressed in a gray or black three-piece suit, wore a felt fedora, and stood straight. He had already lost much of his hair, which helped to give him a dignified and weathered look. When deep in contemplation, which was much of the time, he would draw his eyebrows together narrowly. The feature everyone noticed first was his eyes: a bright but pale blue—to many friends, an index of the intensity of the thought behind them.

He liked to take long walks through the countryside, and he liked to sketch, always in black and white, because he was colorblind. Everything in his life was ordered and neat: he kept every tool he owned in exactly the right place and always wrote his thank-you notes on Christmas Day. He enjoyed making things with his hands, and he loved telling stories to his daughter, Joan, the nine-year-old on the balcony. At night, he would regale her with tales about two pixies named Tim and Bell and their droopy-eared cocker spaniel, Uncle Zachariah. He made up these stories as he went, always ending in a way that made her want to hear more.

He felt deeply; he observed deeply; he saw every event as an opportunity to train his mind. Disciplined in the extreme, he believed that outward order, created by staying in control of his actions and his attire, could offset inner turmoil. And of the latter there was much. Kennan despaired for his country and for himself. To his friends, he appeared perpetually worried. Throughout his life, he kept a dark and somber diary, entering a world of literary self-flagellation even on days when he appeared cheery. When traveling alone, instead of calling ahead to find a good restaurant, he would wait until the last minute, rush out to the most miserable-looking place in the neighborhood, and then complain about the food.

Kennan felt an almost karmic connection to the Soviet Union. An older relative, also named George Kennan, had explored Russia in the late nineteenth century and written popular books criticizing the czardom and describing life in Siberia. The younger Kennan would often say that he felt like a reincarnation of the traveler: his birthday, he would point out, February 16, 1904, fell fifty-nine years to the day after his namesake’s.

Soon after joining the Foreign Service, Kennan had begun to study the Soviet Union. He began working in the American embassy in Moscow when it opened in 1933, after the United States normalized relations with the Communist government. He stayed until 1937 and returned in 1944. He traveled extensively, studied the Soviet economy, and read much of Russia’s classical literature. He started writing a book on Chekhov, though he never finished it. He spoke better formal Russian than Stalin, whose thick Georgian accent was hard for many Muscovites to understand.

Living abroad, Kennan missed the events that transformed America during his early adult years: the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the mobilization for World War II. His distance from his homeland was matched by his closeness to this new place. As always Russia seems something poignantly familiar and significant to me—as though I had lived here in childhood, and I react intensely to everything I see and hear, he wrote upon his return to Moscow in 1944. It gave me an indescribable sort of satisfaction to feel myself back again in the midst of these people—with their tremendous pulsating warmth and vitality. I sometimes feel that I would rather be sent to Siberia among them . . . than to live on Park Avenue among our own stuffy folk.

These warm feelings extended only to the people and the landscape, and only to the boundaries of Russia proper. For the Soviet government, and for communism, Kennan had nothing but contempt. Having worked as Ambassador Joseph Davies’s interpreter during the purge trials of the 1930s, Stalin’s first effort to exterminate everyone who might have ever had an independent or counterrevolutionary thought, Kennan saw through the dictator’s madness and demonic suspicion. Stalin, in turn, was aware of the young American and his opinions.

During World War II, Kennan watched Moscow squeeze its supposed allies whenever it could. In the months leading up to the exultation in Red Square, he tried desperately to warn Washington that the Soviet Union was gobbling up eastern Europe and absorbing lands with every right to independence. Poland—an ally of the United States and Russia and an early victim of the Nazis—was a particular concern. Kennan was certain that the Soviet Union was behind the massacre of nearly five thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest early in the war. In 1944, the Soviets had refused to give aid after the Polish resistance rose up against the Germans in Warsaw; more frustratingly to Kennan, Moscow even refused to allow the United States the use of a base in Ukraine to help deliver arms to the resistance. It seemed clear to Kennan that Moscow intended to turn postwar Poland into a communist vassal state, not one run by democrats or friends of the West. Soviet political aims in Europe are not, in the main, consistent with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the continent, Kennan wrote his friend Charles Bohlen, then Franklin Roosevelt’s interpreter, in January 1945.

No matter how anxious he felt as delight engulfed the Moscow streets on May 9, Kennan was still the ranking American in the capital. He had to respond to this outpouring somehow. He stood upon the pedestal: deeply hostile to the government, devoted to the people, and terrified that some epic clash was looming between a country he had learned to love and the country he served. The crowd quieted and looked up; his daughter stopped tossing the candy and peeked over at her father.

Congratulations on the day of victory, shouted Kennan. All honor to the Soviet allies. The crowd screamed riotously, and he darted back inside.

THAT SAME DAY, another fast-rising student of international affairs sat in his office in Grosvenor Square, London. He was exhausted, having spent the previous days racing around the German front. But the winding down of the war meant the acceleration of his job. And he would soon get an urgent message—to his mind, the best he could possibly receive.

Thirty-eight-year-old Paul Henry Nitze was one of the directors of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, an organization charged with investigating the effectiveness of the Allied bombardment of German industry. Ground troops had dominated past wars, but many people believed that airpower would win the wars of the future. Nitze’s job was to draw the strategic lessons from this conflict.

Nitze stood a wiry five foot nine and three-quarters. What everyone noticed first was his intensity: the pencil ripping through paper as he took notes, the constant motion, the desire to break every problem apart and reassemble it as a series of neatly ordered lists. He grasped concepts quickly; he gave orders well and carried them out exactly; he seemed to need little sleep. Even when ostensibly relaxing at home, he would stay up late talking, eating, and drinking but then get up at four A.M. to read. He delighted in the origin of his last name. Nitze, he liked to assert, comes from the same root as the Greek word nike, "and the Greek word nike means ‘victory.’ "

He dressed with haste, but always in a fine suit and often in elegant suspenders. Although he was perpetually a bit rumpled, he gave the impression of a man with excellent taste who had more important things on his mind. (A burglar once cleaned out his closet and passed up everything else in the house.) When at home, he would begin his days by practicing Bach on the piano. After work, he would return and mix a martini for himself, judging the gin and vermouth ratio according to, he claimed, a finely calibrated sense of sound. He loved to meet new people. PHN collects people, his wife wrote, as some collect butterflies.

An economist by training, Nitze had spent the 1930s working as an investment banker (and learning that one can make money even when an economy collapses). He had moved from Wall Street to Washington as the Panzers rumbled through France in the early summer of 1940. He spent much of the next five years at the State Department, mainly working to obtain strategic minerals from South America. But in May 1945, as the cease-fire sounded, he was flying back and forth between London and the front lines, carrying a pistol. His noncombatant ID for that period shows a haggard figure, bow tie slightly askew.

He had come to the USSBS through a back door. In the fall of 1944, an old family friend, Colonel Guido Perera, mentioned that he was helping to start up this new organization. A few days later, Nitze got into a fierce argument with his boss at the Foreign Economic Administration, Leo Crowley, over a group of people Nitze had borrowed from elsewhere in the State Department to help on a project. The fight ended with Nitze resigning and Crowley hollering that if he quit now the younger man would never again work in a Democratic administration. Nitze strode out, hopped in a cab, and headed to Perera’s USSBS offices at the Pentagon. As he liked to tell the story, he had another job within two hours of Crowley’s threat.

Just as Russia had special meaning for Kennan, so did Germany for Nitze. Both his grandfathers had been born there, he learned the language as a child, and his parents identified strongly with its intellectual traditions and culture. The Nitzes had been in Germany when World War I broke out; seven-year-old Paul had watched from a hotel window in Munich while people lined the sides of the central road to cheer the first soldiers marching off to the front. His father pinned a small American flag on the boy’s clothes so that no one would mistake him for a Brit. At fifteen, Paul worked in the engine room of a ship that traveled across the Atlantic to Germany. He returned in 1929, delightedly exploring Berlin and the countryside by bicycle with a new friend named Alexander Calder. In spring 1937, he had cruised through the country with his wife in a Ford Model T. As an adult, Nitze found much pleasure in Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, and Hegel. The culture of the fallen Kaiser Reich was to be admired and honored, and his USSBS work was thus much more than a means to analyze the effects of the Allied bombing; it was part of a quest to understand what had deformed the country of his roots.

Nitze’s job in early May of 1945 was to track down the surviving leaders of the Third Reich, particularly those who could assess the effectiveness of the air campaign. Nitze was coordinating a series of teams dashing about countrywide, measuring bomb crater depths and rounding up enemy technocrats. He would join his men for interrogations, when not journeying through the ruins himself, and then return to headquarters to report back.

And this day, as he worked in London, he got an urgent message. Two of his people poking through makeshift offices in northern Germany had found a door marked Speer, gone inside, and waited. About an hour later, an elegant man walked in and declared that, yes, he was indeed Reichminister Albert Speer—the man known as Hitler’s architect. Speer probably knew more than anyone else about what the raids had accomplished, and now he was in Nitze’s hands.

ALBERT SPEER HAD JOINED the Nazis out of misplaced idealism and opportunism, not boiling hatred. An energetic young storm trooper, he caught Hitler’s eye in 1933 and became the Führer’s luncheon partner. From then on, each step forward meant one deeper into darkness. Soon he earned the task of designing the structures appropriate for a Thousand-Year Reich. His statues would out-tower the Statue of Liberty; his arches would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe; history, he hoped, would rank his buildings far above those of the pharaohs. His personality matched his creations: cold and technocratic, overwhelming and overbearing.

In 1942, Speer became the Reich’s minister of armaments. For the next three years, he would maniacally, and brilliantly, manage steel shipments, railroad tracks, and components for V-2 missiles. As German production somehow kept going under the rain of bombs, Speer began to earn a reputation as a wartime genius: a master of detail who could somehow increase Germany’s fighter aircraft production even after the Allies had destroyed all the plants along with the ball-bearing factories that fed them. Speer was a worthy enemy, the West decided. His black magic explained how Germany had resisted for so long.

But in May 1945, the towering enemy had crumbled. Hitler had spent most of the past year living in a damp underground bunker, receiving daily injections of sulfides and other toxins that he considered panaceas, even as they slowly mottled his skin and rotted his mind. As the Russians and Americans closed in, he demanded one last round of death, calling for the heads of his brother-in-law, his old surgeon, and other newfound traitors. Then he put a pistol in his mouth while his wife of twenty-four hours poisoned herself next to him on their sofa.

With Hitler dead and the war over, Speer knew the role he would have to play to survive: the man of all-knowing competence. Germany was full of besotted men who had once held great power and who either defied their captors or were merely too hungover to be of much use as informants. The Allies could capture them, interrogate them, learn nothing, and have no reason to keep them alive. Speer would be affable, charming, and indispensable.

The interrogation took place in Glücksburg Castle, a beautiful moated Renaissance structure near the Danish frontier. Nitze and his colleagues, including the future UN ambassador George Ball and the future renowned writer on economics John Kenneth Galbraith, stayed on a boat in the harbor. They spent the mornings preparing questions and then arrived at the Schloss each afternoon around two. Speer would sit on a low settee, hands locked around one knee, in a small room furnished in red and gold brocade. As he listened to the questions, he would lean forward a bit. When answering, he would rock gently back and forth, always calm and confident. The one rational man in the utterly irrational system was telling his tale. Speer’s insights and information were exactly what the Strategic Bombing Survey needed.

Commanding an awe-inspiring knowledge of the German war machine, he brought the whole dreaded system to life with detail. American bombs had been less effective than British bombs but more intelligently targeted. Attacks on basic infrastructure, such as chemical plants, had most worried Speer—worried him so much, indeed, that he argued against putting other targets underground. I wanted to continue to offer you finished armaments production as a target so that you would not get the idea of destroying our industries producing basic materials which could only exist above ground.

He sounded at times like a coach who knew he outclassed the fellow on the other sideline and would have won if only he had better players. He never paused. He never evaded. He was never at a loss for words. He reviewed each American attack to explain why it had not done as much damage as it should have. The second visible attempt at economic destruction was the attack on airframe production in February, 1944, he said during one session. In this case it was a mistake on your part that you attacked the airframe production for so many months and not the production of motors. It was not long before the captured man began to cast a spell over his interrogators. Ball later recalled that Speer evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.

One day, the survey investigators arrived to find Speer’s secretary in tears. Her boss had technically been free, but that morning unknown men had seized him and taken him away. Perhaps they were remnants of the Gestapo? But, no: soon Speer arrived, calm as ever, to explain that another American intelligence unit had taken him, not realizing he was already working with the USSBS. We were always having worse mix-ups than that under Hitler, he joked.

After more than a week of grueling discussion of German armaments, Nitze got a message from one of his superiors: Paul, if you’ve got any further things you want to find out from Speer you’d better get him tomorrow. The day after that, Speer would be arrested. Nitze thought it over and decided he had enough dry details about Nazi factories.

The next afternoon, the team quizzed Speer about the inner workings of the Third Reich—the lives of Hitler, Göring, Himmler, and the rest of the Nazi high command. The story he told was astonishing. Germany had lost the war, Speer claimed, because the leaders were soft, drunken womanizers, entirely ignorant of the happenings on the front lines. Appropriately, their final crucial decisions were made inside an underground bunker where even the air had to be pumped in. Speer portrayed himself as the one countervailing force. He had not succumbed to greed during the glory days, or to vengefulness during Götterdämmerung. At the very end, he had countermanded Hitler’s orders for a scorched-earth retreat—this, he claimed, he did out of loyalty to the German people and the German future, not disloyalty to the Führer. He had even returned to meet with Hitler in the bunker one last time, sneaking into Berlin as the rest of his former colleagues scattered.

The final interrogation ended at four-thirty A.M. The Americans told Speer to go home and get a good night’s sleep. A couple of hours later, tanks rolled up to Glücksburg Castle and troops carrying submachine guns and hand grenades dashed in. So now the end has come, Speer remarked, surrendering. That’s good. It was all only kind of an opera anyway.

GEORGE KENNAN KNEW Germany almost as well as Nitze did. He had grown up in Milwaukee, one of America’s most Germanic cities, and lived briefly in the country at age eight. He learned the language, returned as a young Foreign Service officer, and then worked in Berlin after his first posting to Moscow. When the United States entered the war, he was serving in the American embassy in Berlin. When news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came one night over shortwave radio, he helped burn all the embassy’s codes and secret documents.

The Nazis soon rounded up Kennan and his colleagues and sent them for what turned out to be five months’ internment in Bad Nauheim: a well-known spa with mineral springs, where FDR had summered in the 1890s; the Americans were confined in a rather pleasant place known as Jeschke’s Grand Hotel. Kennan’s friends there remembered him fondly for the historical lectures he gave and the way he negotiated with the German captors over subjects like rations and the loudness with which the Gestapo played Ping-Pong. He even played catcher on one of the pickup baseball teams. But the detainees were isolated; they were not contacted by their government and they had no idea when their imprisonment would end. Until his release in May 1942, Annelise Kennan did not know where her husband was.

With the war over, Kennan wanted to find the opposition figures he had met while in the country, particularly a man named Helmuth von Moltke. On May 10, the day after the outpouring in Red Square, Kennan wrote to a colleague in the Foreign Service inquiring about the whereabouts of his old friend.

The two first met, secretly, in 1940. Von Moltke, a member of Germany’s greatest military family, had been reading The Federalist Papers. He told Kennan he was seeking guidance for how his country should reconstitute itself after it inevitably lost the war—a comforting thought for the American at a time when the Wehrmacht seemed invincible. The war had now ended as von Moltke had foreseen. But Kennan had had no news of the man himself since 1941. Now he sought not just a friend but confirmation that Nazism had not infected all of Germany and that wise men who had resisted Hitler from the beginning had survived.

The big question for Germany was what would come next. The country that had driven two world wars in the past thirty years had descended into chaos. Its neighbors wanted to loot it, to break it apart, or to do both. Many people thought Germany, or its culture, was fundamentally deformed. The U.S. government’s Morgenthau Plan, which almost became official policy, called for converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.

Kennan, however, believed Germany needed U.S. aid and assistance; weak and abandoned, it would soon become a province of Moscow. The only solution was to divide the nation and try to make the western territories vigorous enough to resist Russian influence. A dismembered Germany, with the west as a buffer to the forces of totalitarianism, was preferable to a united Germany that could bring those forces to the North Sea.

To Kennan, this was just one of many lines that must be drawn through the map of Europe. The United States must split the world into spheres of influence, he declared with resignation. We would maintain influence in western Europe; the Soviets could have eastern Europe. There was not much point in hoping for a belt of neutral countries down the middle of the continent: Russia would only gobble them up. We should accept as an accomplished fact the complete partition of Germany along the line of the Russian zone of occupation, Kennan wrote.

Planning for the postwar world, of course, meant finding people who could run a respectable, competent western German government. And that was where von Moltke came in: he was the man who Kennan thought could best rule this new country.

Kennan’s hopes were soon dashed. Von Moltke had survived the early years of the war, quietly hiding the depth of his opposition to Hitler even as he held secret meetings to plan for a post-Nazi Germany. But the Nazis had caught on and arrested him in January 1944. He had remained active in prison, smuggling out passionate letters about the future of Germany to his wife, Freya, who hid them in beehives in her garden. He survived a year, but the Allies did not defeat Germany fast enough. In January 1945, the People’s Court of Nazi Germany condemned von Moltke to death.

His final letters describe the scene in vivid detail. He was like a journalist reporting his own execution, down to a sketch of where everyone at the trial sat. He was as cool as Speer, if in service to a greater cause. My dear heart, first I must say that quite obviously the last 24 hours of a life are in no way different from any others. I always imagined that one would feel shock, that one would say to oneself: Now the sun sets for the last time for you, he wrote. None of that is the case. He would go calmly, he said, feeling that God was on his side. His last letter read: Only together do we constitute a human being. We are, as I wrote a few days ago, symbolically, created as one. That is true, literally true. Therefore, my love, I am certain that you will not lose me on this earth, not for a moment.

In May 1945, Kennan argued the case for von Moltke’s promotion in a letter to a State Department colleague. I can personally think of no one who would eventually make a better political leader for other Germans. Four months earlier, von Moltke had been hanged.

FOR ALL KENNAN’S dismay over von Moltke, he had other priorities that spring than the matter of choosing a new ruler for Germany. He wished urgently to convince America to look realistically at the men now running the Soviet Union. In May 1945, he wrote a long memo that he would later consider one of the most important of his life. Peace, like spring, has finally come to Russia, he began; but of those two arrivals, the change of seasons was far the more noticeable on the Moscow scene.

Kennan was known inside the State Department as nothing more than a highly competent clerk, but he had enormous confidence in his ability to provide a map for a shattered world. He argued that one of Russia’s greatest challenges would be managing all the territory it had acquired in the war. He loved to quote Edward Gibbon’s line that there is nothing more contrary to nature than the attempt to hold in obedience distant provinces, and he made that argument, and cited the scholar, here. Russia now was adding subjects from Estonia to East Prussia to the Kuril Islands at the same time that it was trying to extend its authority over nations long hostile, for example Poland and Hungary.

The trouble was linguistic and cultural. The people in these lands did not speak Russian and did not identify with the Russians. More broadly, Kennan correctly saw that the Soviets had transformed communism from a set of well-meaning principles into a rationale for totalitarianism. By 1945, Stalin had crushed the few ideals (and idealists) that Lenin had not liquidated. People would still do what the Kremlin asked, or commanded, them to do. But they would not do so because they believed that the doctrine preached in Moscow would make for a better world, or that Moscow even had that intention. The Soviet government, wrote Kennan, has before its gates a submissive but no longer an inspired mass of followers. True in Moscow, that was even truer in the conquered territories.

The resulting strain on the Soviet empire, Kennan argued, would mean that Stalin would need Western assistance and cooperation. And here was his main point: Stalin knew exactly how to manipulate the United States. The Soviet Union was constantly leading America on, asking for one favor and then demanding two more. They observe with gratification that in this way a great people can be led, like an ever-hopeful suitor, to perform one act of ingratiation after the other without ever reaching the goal which would satisfy its ardor and allay its generosity. When conflict came, Russia would simply call a summit, apologize, and announce that it was starting anew. America would acquiesce—until the next time Russia decided to stick its finger in the eye of its unwitting rival. Then the cycle would restart.

Kennan’s memo ended in pained lament. A group of mendacious rulers crudely rationalizing their power by preaching a false ideology had clearly overreached. But the United States would need steady nerves and deep thinking to counter them. And success was not likely, he said, as long as Stalin treated America the way a farmer treats an ox with a rope through its nose: with occasional trepidation but an unwavering sense that he can move it wherever he wants.

Kennan’s memo was forceful, beautifully written, and largely right—and it was ignored. He was just a cookie-pushing diplomat with a fondness for Gibbon (whom few people had read) and much venom toward Stalin (whom many people still admired). For nearly another year, the United States would trust and blithely negotiate with the man known to American tabloids as Uncle Joe. Kennan’s time to influence the struggle between the two new superpowers had yet to come.

NITZE HAD HIS OWN problems with the USSR. He desperately wanted to capture key Germans before the Red Army did, and he sneaked around Flensburg, hoping the Soviets wouldn’t be able to figure out who he was interviewing. In a letter home, he compared his operations to the plot of a spy novel.

He was more right than he knew. For while Nitze carefully locked his documents away, one of the Survey’s assistants, Jürgen Kuczynski, was sending them off to the Soviets. Kuczynski had been spying for a decade and had even recruited Klaus Fuchs, the atomic scientist working in Britain who later gave the West’s nuclear secrets to Stalin. Kuczynski had been careful over